The Lottery

The lottery is a short story by Shirley Jackson.It starts out with a cheerful tone and has a frightening ending.The first few paragraphs describes the weather as being nice and sunny. There were flowers blossoming and the grass was richly green. It also describes the activities of the village people before the lottery and the collecting of stones by the children. The paragraphs makes the lottery seem festive. The next few paragraphs describe the preparation of the lottery by Mr Summers and Mr Grave. It starts getting a bit nervous in the next few paragraphs as the people start to pick their pieces of paper out of the box. The following paragraphs make the readers get a very bad feeling, as the picked people narrows down to a family and a member of the family starts protesting. The end was very unexpected, as readers find out what the villagers would do to the chosen person with stones and rocks. I was shocked and taken completely by surprise when I got to the end of the book. However, I think that this short story is quite good to read and it has a interesting twist at the end. Readers will almost certaintly be taken by surprise when they get to the end of the book.

Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon is a fiction story about a mentally retarded man named Charlie Gordon.The story is made up of a series of progress reports written by Charlie. Flowers for Algernon is written from Charlie's perspective. When first reading the story, readers would immediately notice that the first few progress reports are full of grammatical errors. As they read further on, they would realise that it was purposely written like that. In the the first progress report, Charlie introduces himself. As the story gets on, Charlie writes about the tests he had gone through and his fears of failing the tests given to him and his hopes that he could still have the operation. At the point, readers will still be quite confused by what this story is about and what was the operation which Charlie wanted to have so much. The next few progress reports in the story explains quite a bit of reader's questions and readers would get a clearer view of the story.After the operations, Charlie expresses his disappointment that nothing had happened and that he was still not smart yet.The quality of Charlie's progress reports starts getting better, although there were still quite a few grammatical errors.The following progress reports describe Charlie's relationship with his coworkers.Though his coworkers make fun of him, Charlie still thinks that they were his friends. The next  few report expresses his delight at beating Algernon and his growing awareness that coworkers were making fun of him instead of being his friends. Charlie also discovers that he is starting to love Miss Kinnian. At this point, Charlie has already became very smart and he has started using more complicated words to write his progress reports. In the next few reports, he gets kicked out of the factory.He also starts getting interested in the area of increasing human intelligence and Algernon starts getting aggressive. Charlie finds out that he would regress as well. In the next few reports, Charlie starts regressing. He expresses his fear of losing everything he had perviously knew and hopes that he could retain some of the things that he had learnt. Charlie also starts using simple words again.At the end of the story, Charlie reverts back to being mentally retarded and decides to move away as he did not want to be pitied by others. He expresses hopes of learning how to read again and having a fresh start.